come july 1st, i will now inhabit a condo so close to work i should have to take a pay cut. it has a den, a jacuzzi tub, a dishwasher and my undying love.

unless i find something wrong with it. my luck, there’s a leper colony behind the fridge or something.

stay tuned.

thursday night, lee’s palace, black rebel motorcycle club. two bands in support: the exploders (i think) and the carnations. mike and i skipped the exploders and showed up a few minutes before the carnations took the stage. if only we’d known, we could’ve stayed at our respective homes and watched the last period of the wings/hurricanes.

first, the crowd: brmc is heavy enough that there were skids (which, inevitably, led to devil signs), glam enough that there were teenyboppers and brooding enough to bring out the shoegazers in fake army jackets. the place was packed, though; one big multicultural family.

but let’s talk about the carnations, shall we? i first saw them some time ago, when they followed white van speaker scam onto the stage at the now (effectively) defunct el mocambo. midway through their first song we decided to leave, as they sucked it loud and hard. and when i say sucked, this is what i mean: as near as i can figure, an evil scientist has built a giant vacuum cleaner that sucks talent and flair and placed sloan in front of it. what has come out is a band called the carnations. i’m not even a big fan of sloan, so this should tell you how very vile the carnations were.

guys, that whole my-eighties-tshirt-is-so-uncool-it’s-cool, i-haven’t-washed-my-beddy-beddy-bed-bed-hair-in-days look is done. over. you want people to believe you’re cool and not just a bunch of posers? learn to play some real fucking music instead of spending all your time shopping in kensington market. this was the thought going through my head as the singer droned out, “it’s a miracle of science that you’re still here.” yeah. no fucking shit.

and guys, i’m a drummer. or, rather i was. but it’s like drinking: once you’ve been an alcoholic, you’re one forever. thus, to the chagrin of my friends and colleagues, i tap incessantly. i’ll tap along with anything that’s making a beat: loud music from a nearby car, washing machines, whores downstairs, pepsid ac commercials…you name it. but guys…last night i wasn’t tapping during your set. at all. wait, wait, that’s a lie; i did find myself tapping once, but it was to a different song. see, i wanted to psychologically withdraw from what you were inflicting on us (it wasn’t unlike a mugging, dear reader…they’d taken my money and were hurting me terribly) that i’d begun to sing frank black‘s “(i want to live on an) abstract plain” in my head, and was drumming along with it. but the horrible wailing brought me back to the abyss, and i just had to ride it out. i looked back over my shoulder at mike, and he appeared to be making a valiant attempt at transcendental meditation, but the frustrated look on his face told me that it hadn’t worked. too bad, ’cause it would’ve been cool. finally, mercifully, it ended and the bad men went away. mike’s comment: “i’ve never before seen a band that made me dumber.” well put, michael.

brmc took the stage around 11:45 and let fly with “red eyes and tears”. all in all the show was good, though unremarkable. they played each song on the cd (except “too real”, i think) and five new ones. the highlight was definitely “whatever happened to my rock n’ roll (punk song)”, and they nearly had another stunner with the final song of the encore – “salvation” – but they went on this long rambling bass solo that lost the crowd after rolling up the tempo just moments before. they should’ve just ended with that bang, but they wouldn’t let it die and the crowd mentally went home before the show ended. oh well. i think i would’ve enjoyed them more had the wanknations not opened for them.

not a bad show for $18.50, i guess. i think mogwai spoiled me. hopefully the white stripes (two weeks from tomorrow) will re-affirm my faith in things.

my ears finally stopped ringing thursday morning, about 50 hours after the show ended.

last night mike and i set out for lee’s palace to watch mogwai burn and pillage toronto. i’d found out earlier in the day that i was now on the guest list (through a complicated communication pipeline involving my brother tim, his co-worker paul, martin bulloch and martin’s girlfriend), so we had two tickets to give away. two people accepted the offer but then elected to skip the concert, the silly bastards. didn’t they know? meh. as it turns out, mike and i got ourselves into the show for free courtesy of wee marty, and then sold our tickets. scalpers outside were asking $70 for a pair of $20 tickets, and – after much confusion on my part – one of them gave me $50(!) for my pair. so, basically, someone paid mike and i $10 to go see mogwai last night. our night was made already! so, we walked inside and i got a pint of the dark stuff; mike got some pussy german beer, i’m not sure which.

mighty flashlight opened – it turns out i’d heard their stuff before though i didn’t remember them. they weren’t great, but not horrible either. the one thing i really loved about them was that they got on and off the stage in about 30 minutes, bless ’em. bravo, guys, well done. no one’s there to see you, just show us what you’ve got and get your asses backstage to drink mogwai’s beer. apparently they did just this, and then barry called us cunts for it later. anyway…

so, with a tiny little bit of fanfare, mogwai took the stage a little after 11:00. the perfect opening, too: “yes! i am a long way from home”, and the crowd went loopy right from the first notes. well…polite canadian loopy. at the beginning of every song that the crowd was really waiting for – “xmas steps”, “like herod”, “helicon 1” – we’d start yelping, but then become quiet and reverent as torontonians are wont to do. stuart seemed a bit confused by this, as if expecting us to let it all out at some point instead of standing and swaying quietly. he may well have been berating us, too, but no one could understand a word the little fucker said except, “thanks!”. ach, we went loopy anyway.

highlights…well, all of ’em. you know there’s usually a spot or two in a concert where you’re just not into the song? even the trail of dead concert had that, when jason reece was really off his nut singing “aged dolls” or “homage”…but this show last night didn’t have that. i was actually wary of the material from rock action that i knew would be played, since it’s my least favourite disc, but the kick at a live show can do a lot for songs, so “2 rights make one wrong” and “you don’t know jesus” sounded a lot better than i’d remembered. the fact that they played “like herod” and “helicon 1” was just gravy. i can point out two favourite spots in the whole night, though: first, during the quietest part of “xmas steps”, when it was just stuart playing reallw low, we could hear all the noise from the bar – bottles clinking, drinks spilling, conversations between the people at the bar too fucking wasted to know rock warfare was being waged 75 feet to the south – mixed in with the music. mike leaned over to me and said, “i can’t believe it’s so quiet…you can hear a pin drop in here!”. my response: “yeah…that ain’t gonna last.” and as if on cue, whammo. devil music. the same thing happened during “like herod”.

but my absolute favourite moment was near the end of the encore, when “my father my king” was well into the second movement (my apologies for using so wanky a term as “movement” to describe a mogwai song, but “part” or section” didn’t sound grandiose enough), and we all knew it was the end. stuart distilled the whole mogwai night down to one little move: he reached over to his marshall stack and just drove his hand to the right, over all of the knobs, throwing everything up to ten. it was such a little thing, but it seemed perfect. you want loud? here’s loud. jewish fucking hymns require more power. by the final note everyone in the place was clapping, but wearing stunned looks. why? though we were clapping and yelling as loud as we could, we couldn’t hear ourselves. i was clapping inches from my nose and i couldn’t hear it at all. we’d lost. they’d won. we should’ve known better.

when i got home, i couldn’t sleep as there were two tiny men in my ears hitting china cymbals with xylophone mallets. they’re still at it, 17 hours later. i think big sugar is the only other band to do this to my head. trail of dead had two cracks at me and didn’t manage that. fucking young team, man.

go celtic.

PARDON??!?!?!!!?

ok, uhhhh…i know i already sent this out, like, six months ago. but i should really have known better than to do so when music from 2001 was still rolling in. so, now…the revised list. some cds have changed position, some have fallen off the chart altogether. and so, without further ado:

10 . revolt against tired noises . stratford 4 . brmc (who you’ll read about in roughly 60 seconds) de-fuzzed, in an echo chamber, with a female voice or two.

09 . y’all get scared now, ya hear? . the reindeer section . supergroup. members of mogwai, snow patrol, belle & sebastien, astrid, arab strap and others get together and cut a cd after meeting up at a folk implosion show. you can hear barlow’s influence throughout. there’s some gorgeous mellow music here.

08 . brmc . black rebel motorcycle club . imagine the jesus and mary chain on a 70s revival tour, but with more hooks.

07 . amnesiac . radiohead . spotty. brilliant at times (“packt like sardines in a crushd tin box”, “you & whose army?”, “knives out”, “dollars and cents”, “spinning plates”), but for shit at times as well.

06 . those who tell the truth shall die those who tell the truth shall live . explosions in the sky . i don’t know how to describe them. instrumental. cinematic. something midway between those two.

05 . asleep in the back . elbow . this is what i wrote before: “take radiohead. extract thom yorke and replace him with rob dickinson from catherine wheel. add jordon zadorozny from blinker the star to do some guitar canoodling and maybe even a little bit of gomez’s pseudo-latin influence, mix well with a bunch of anti-rockstar pixie dust and you have elbow.”

04 . let it come down . spiritualized . the best live show i’ve seen since…well, since trail of dead back in march. but one of the top five i’ve seen, i think. space rock? nah. call it taking a therapist’s-eye-view via the music of someone in the nth stage of self-destruction. or brilliance. or something midway between those two.

03 . mass romantic . the new pornographers . another ‘supergroup’. quite possibly the catchiest songs this side of the charlatans uk or the beta band, and with the strangely captivating voice of neko case too. you can’t go wrong.

02 . white blood cells . the white stripes . garage rockers in the guise of saviours. they appeal to the minimalist in me. they’ve shed a lot of the blues that showed up in their earlier music – usually a bad thing – but they’ve pushed it a little closer to punk and it works, goddammit. take my advice: throw the entire ouevre of the strokes into the toilet and use it for target practice. this is it.

01 . agaetis byrjun . sigur ros . [insert standard dan gushy-gush explanation of the word “genius” and how it applies to sigur ros here]

honorable mentions:
bardo pond . dilate
beta band, the . hot shots ii
dylan, bob . love and theft
guided by voices . isolation drills
harcourt, ed . here be monsters
kim band, the . girlology
muse . origin of symmetry
phillips, grant lee . mobilize
starsailor . love is here
tielli, martin . we didn’t even suspect that he was the poppy salesman

award for ep based solely on interpretation of old jewish folk tune
mogwai . my father, my king

uhhh…more honorable mentions
Clairvoyants . Your New Boundaries
Crystal Method, The . Tweekend
Eels . Souljacker
Farrell, Perry . Song Yet To Be Sung
Good, Matthew . Audio Of Being
Pedro The Lion . The Only Reason I Feel Secure
Silver Mt. Zion . Born Into Trouble As Sparks Fly Upward
Super Furry Animals . Rings Around The World
Toadies . Hell Below / Stars Above
Tool . Lateralus

ok, that’s it, honest. i bought another 20 cds last year, but i won’t mention those. go. god be with you.

ok, so the habs decided to lay down and die last night. really, from the third period of game four on, they looked like they’d thrown it in. they were up two games to one, with a three-goal third period lead. then came the bullshit cross-checking call, then the bench minor. then came the folding of the tents.

after the sting of lost opportunity passes, the canadiens and their fans will reflect on the season, and how improbable their playoff run really was. saku koivu, their captain and best forward was diagnosed with cancer, for christ’s sake. they traded for donald audette to add offensive spark, and he promptly placed his arm under a skate and was lost for most of the season. also lost for an extended period was sheldon souray. doug gilmour, their leader in the second half, was unofficially retired a year earlier. and then there was the hero, the saviour, the bedrock…jose theodore, whose playoff experience was next to nil but whose regular season earned him nominations for both the hart and vezina trophies. this team should never have made the playoffs, let alone upset the goliath bruins in the first round. they were better than anyone could have expected.

which is why it now feels so raw to think of what they had by the throat…and let slip away.

go see the last waltz. it’s been re-released to theatres now that scorsese has finally recovered from the high we was on during the filming. if it’s not playing at a theatre you can get to, rent it. wait for the dvd if you can, though; it’s out may 7.

one of the best rock documentaries ever made, without a doubt. it’s worth it just to see muddy waters show the world how blues and rock are children born of a common mother.

‘one of those bands you just have to see live’ is the tag assigned to spiritualized. armed with frequent spins of the last two albums (ladies and gentlemen we are floating in space and let it come down) and a review from my brother of a show a few weeks back in the uk, i set out for the opera house to catch the travelling jay spaceman show, wondering if the talk could be true.

the dears opened for them…i only caught a few songs, and i wasn’t paying attention to anything other than the bartender next to me, and the logistics of the route to the bathrooms at the opera house. if there were ever a fire, all those relieving themselves would die. so i’ll not say much about the dears. sorry dears.

spiritualized hit the stage around 10:25, bless ’em. i was out taking part in drunken foolishness the night before and i was a bit tired, so i was glad they didn’t wait ’til midnight to get on with it. thanks opera house. they opened with “electricity”. boy did they ever. good, punchy song to get it off the ground, and the light show came right along with it…that song kicked off the trend for the rest of the evening (which i was expecting, given what tim’d told me) of the back-lighting making the guys silhouettes. jason just stood on one side of the stage, near the front but facing back toward the centre, ninety degrees to the crowd. that seemed a bit odd, but i knew they weren’t big on connecting with the audience like that. in fact, not one word was spoken into a mic other than lyrics.

i actually didn’t recognize the next song, nor a lot of what they played for the rest of the set. a lot of the material came from pure phase and lazer guided melodies and even spacemen 3 i guess. but song #3 showed me why jason was standing like that; the song was instrumental and started off slowly and very, very gradually (like, 6-minutes-later-gradually) sped up – very hard to do – and they seemed to be watching jason and letting him control the tempo and acceleration. he was conducting.

now then, i’d like to point something out, to anyone who may read this: no matter how cool you think it is, and how very traditional and deep-seated in your concert-going psyche it may be, holding up your lighter during a slow song (i don’t care that is was during “shine a light”) is idiotic. don’t do it. ever. not even if you’re wearing a tank top and mesh hat at a creed concert and the toilet brush next to you is doing it. not even then. rise above your breeding, toilet brushes. jason believes in you, even in that state. repent, toilet brushes.

i really wish i could remember the set list. i remember “on fire”, “out of sight”, “i think i’m in love”, “walking with jesus” (a spacemen 3 song), and a kickass rendition of “come together”, one of my most favouritest. that was the second-to-last song, i think. i didn’t recognize the last song, but it built up with the lights and we were left winded. they came out for one encore – “lord can you hear me”, which couldn’t have been more perfect – and then they disappeared for good. they played for 1:45, plus the encore; not bad at all.

listen to spiritualized. i didn’t even get into the biggest (studio) appeal of the band, which is observing pierce’s dichotomous relationship with himself and the drugs he keeps ingesting…he loves them, but they kill him. he knows it, but he doesn’t really want to stop. or he does, but not enough. either way, it’s a fascinating thing to hear put to music, but it’s not why you see them live. live, they stand stock-still and appear otherworldly on the stage, wreathed in strobe and holding forth from their stacked marshall pulpit. it’s the power in their preaching that gets you, the force of their bible-thumping. i know, somewhere in that crowd last night, was a kid who didn’t know much about spiritualized and just went to a concert with his buddies not expecting to hear this. not expecting to get religion. and when he went home he probably set aside $20 to go buy let it come down the next morning. or maybe he just got really high. both would be fitting.

thanks spiritualized.

i miss the sun.

i just got back from a week in barbados, and not only is it cold outside, it’s quite grey. yuck. i miss waking up at 8 AM and walking straight to breakfast in shorts and sandals, then hitting the beach or the pool or a 50-foot catamaran with a drink in my hand. i don’t miss the 5-hour flights there and back, nor the inevitable sunburn.

the silver lining: the raptors and the habs both made the playoffs, and i’m back in time to watch them.

jesus, marney’s married.

jesus, marney’s moving away.